The Louvre Museum’s recent major exhibition on the Mamluk Sultanate explores the dynasty’s rich legacy in terms of the art and architecture of Egypt and Syria. The exhibition—a first for Europe—comes more than forty years after a touring exhibition in the United States curated by Dr Esin Atil. “Mamluks (1250-1517)” brings together 260 works from…
Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist is a new publication and exhibition organised by the Katonah Museum of Art and the first major museum survey of Iranian-born artist Ali Banisadr. Covering twenty years of the artist’s practice, the exhibition and catalogue offer a fresh perspective on the artist’s career across the mediums of painting, drawing and printmaking.
Ancient India is a new publication and exhibition by the British Museum that explores the shared origins of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain devotional art in figurative imagery of India’s ancient nature spirits. These three of the world’s major religions originated in India and gradually spread to other regions of the world. Between 200 BCE and…
The Great Mughals, Art, Architecture and Opulence, edited by Susan Stronge, is a new book published by V&A publications to coincide with the exhibition currently on display at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum.
Silk Roads is the accompanying publication to the current exhibition on display at the British Museum in London. Written by the Curators of the Silk Roads exhibition, Sue Brunning, Luk Yu-Ping and Elisabeth R O’Connell, this beautifully illustrated publication examines cross-cultural exchanges that occurred across Asia, Africa and Europe during 500 and 1000 CE.
Vikramjit Ram’s novella Mansur re-imagines life amongst artists working in the imperial atelier of Mughal India. The emperor Jahangir had a deep interest in flora and fauna and dispatched agents far and wide to acquire exotic creatures that may delight him. It was the imperial painter, Mansur who was credited with capturing the sensitivity of…
Divided into two parts set in Iran and the US respectively, Dare the Sea is a new collection of stories from Iranian-American writer Ali Hosseini. The stories, some of which had previously appeared in Guernica, Antioch Review and Story Quarterly, explore Iran’s landscape, culture and how cataclysmic, socio-political changes have shaped the identity and sense…
The twenty-three women photographers featured in Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh’s Breathing Space: Iranian Women Photographers shed light on the state of contemporary photography from Iran. Etehadieh is the founder of Silk Road Gallery, Iran’s first gallery devoted exclusively to photography. Many of the photographers featured in this book have previously exhibited their works at her gallery…
“Replete with symbolism,” writes Navina Najat Haider in Jali: Lattice of Divine Light in Mughal Architecture, “the Indian jali evolved to become both a technical and an aesthetic marvel in Mughal-period buildings, and eventually an international ‘Islamicate’ style of the modern age.”
The Idle Stance of the Tippler Pigeon opens with Nadia, an office worker married to unemployed and intoxicated Mubashir. Her menial office job just about pays the rent for a small shack in Gulberg, Lahore. During the day, she is at the mercy of her lecherous boss.
“China’s Hidden Century” at London’s British Museum features 300 exhibits that are drawn from a tumultuous period that led to the end of the Qing Dynasty. At its peak, the dynasty ruled over one-third of the entire world’s population.
Iran is certainly enjoying a moment through a series of international exhibitions. In 2021, the V&A Museum had “Epic Iran” whose tickets sold out upon release. In Los Angeles, the Getty Villa had “Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World”. In 2023, the British Museum has now added, “Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece”.
The ancient Greeks wrote extensively about their distaste for the opulence of the Persians of the Achemenid empire. However, archaeological evidence suggests that the Athenians were not themselves immune from luxury and even incorporated modes of Eastern opulence within their own cultural repertoire.
Island of Bewilderment is a recent English translation of Jazire-ye Sargardāni, a historical novel by the late Simin Daneshvar, originally in Persian and published in 1992. Daneshvar (1921- 2012) was considered Iran’s first female novelist. Her books were about the lives of ordinary people, especially women, through the lens of political and social events in…
The Silk Road has long caught the imagination of travelers and has hence been the subject of interest by many writers, the majority of whom at least in English have hailed from the West. Iftikhar Malik, a professor of modern history at Bath Spa University, in his 2020 book, The Silk Road and Beyond, offers…